Interesting Links for 17-03-2017

[andrewducker]

WordStar: A writer’s word processor (tags: writing Technology history ) The finest hashtag of all time has been found Beating even the Susan Boyle album launch hashtag - #susanalbumparty
(tags: funny twitter viaJennieRigg ) More than two-thirds of children in poverty in the UK are in working families (tags: poverty uk inequality children ) From

Comments

[jusummerhayes]

It's disgraceful that we're still talking about poverty in a country as prosperous, or so we're told, as ours.

[kalimac]

The sneering editorial remark about emacs at the start of the WordStar article merely shows that whoever made it has absolutely no idea of what makes WordStar appealing.

[skington]

Could be worse; they could have sneered "try vi instead" and missed the whole point that the author does not want to switch contexts.

[simont]

Which seems particularly odd given that the article itself explains that at great length and with some clarity!

I suppose that, in principle, emacs is reprogrammable enough that you (where 'you' is of course not the actual author who wants to use Wordstar or equivalent) could probably at least try to implement the same feature set in elisp as an alternative keyboard map. (Indeed, now I think about it, surely someone must have given it a shot.) I doubt it'd be quite right, though; I've not used Wordstar myself, but just from reading that article, the flexible multiple block selection in particular sounds as if it would be very hard to get Emacs to mimic, because Emacs's handling of marks and blocks is idiosyncratic to the point of bizarre in its own right, and not one of the easier parts to reconfigure at the elisp layer

[flick]

"People who are not expecting to cry will cry."

I got choked up just reading the article! (But then, I firmly expect to cry.)